Monday, December 28, 2009

Israeli Organ Harvesting Goes Mainstream

The former head of Israel's Abu Kabir forensic institute has admitted that in the 1990s, the institute's forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Palestinians, without the permission of their families.

The issue emerged with publication of an interview with the then-head of Abu Kabir forensic institute, Dr Jehuda Hiss.

In it, Hiss said, "We started to harvest corneas... Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family".

The Channel 2 report said that in the 1990s, forensic specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.

In a response to the TV report, the Israeli military confirmed that the practice took place.

In the interview, Hiss described how his doctors would mask the removal of corneas from bodies.

"We'd glue the eyelid shut," he said. "We wouldn't take corneas from families we knew would open the eyelids."

Sheppard-Hughes said she felt the interview must be made public now because "the symbolism, you know, of taking skin of the population considered to be the enemy, (is) something, just in terms of its symbolic weight, that has to be reconsidered."

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

U.S. Now Trains More Drone Operators Than PilotsBy Edward Helmore
The Observer

As part of an expanding programme of battlefield automation, the American Air Force has said it is now training more drone operators than fighter and bomber pilots.

Three years ago, the service was able to fly just 12 drones at a time; now it can fly more than 50. At a trade conference outside Washington last week, military contractors presented a future vision in which pilotless drones serve as fighters, bombers and transports, even automatic mini-drones which attack in swarms.

Five thousand robotic vehicles and drones are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. By 2015, the Pentagon's $230bn arms procurement programme Future Combat Systems expects 15% of America's Armed Forces to be robotic.

A recent study 'The Unmanned Aircraft System Flight Plan 2020-2047' predicted a boom in drone funding to $55bn by 2020 with the greatest changes coming in the 2040s.

"The capability provided by the unmanned aircraft is game-changing," said General Norton Schwartz, the Air Force Chief of Staff. "We can have eyes 24/7 on our adversaries."

This year, the service started training career drone operators with no airborne experience. They operate out of cubicles with eight video screens.

"It is safe to say most pilots will always miss getting back in the air," said Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Turner, who trains pilots. "But we see where the Air Force is going."

This summer, MIT’s Humans and Automation Lab designed an app to turn a standard iPhone into a quick-and-dirty controller for small, smart Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. The idea, according to Prof. Missy Cummings, is to keep things so simple that almost anyone can become a robot wrangler, in an instant.

“Our philosophy is that humans have important jobs they need to do, and should not worry about low-level housekeeping, telling a UAV to go from point to point,” Cummings told Danger Room.

The kinds of users Cummings imagines — Marines and soldiers in urban combat, of course, but also everyday city dwellers looking to scope out the line at the local Starbucks — need bots that work indoors, where GPS signals can’t reach.

Her team’s solution: equip a small robot with LIDAR, fast-scanning lasers that can create quick, electronic models of any environment. Plus, giving the bot new computer algorithms for sending the models back to the iPhone, in the form of simple, graphical maps.

“The goal is that a small micro-UAV can enter a window or door and then map the world, both in 2D and 3D.”

Saturday, July 4, 2009

A poll finds more Americans disagree with the statement that 'Jews control Hollywood.'
But here's one Jew who doesn't.

I have never been so upset by a poll in my life. Only 22% of Americans now believe "the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews," down from nearly 50% in 1964. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which released the poll results last month, sees in these numbers a victory against stereotyping. Actually, it just shows how dumb America has gotten. Jews totally run Hollywood.

How deeply Jewish is Hollywood? When the studio chiefs took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago to demand that the Screen Actors Guild settle its contract, the open letter was signed by:

If either of the Weinstein brothers had signed, this group would have the power to shut down all film production...

The person they were yelling at in that ad was SAG President Alan Rosenberg (take a guess). The scathing rebuttal to the ad was written by entertainment super-agent Ari Emanuel (Jew with Israeli parents)...

The Jews are so dominant, I had to scour the trades to come up with six Gentiles in high positions at entertainment companies. When I called them to talk about their incredible advancement, five of them refused to talk to me, apparently out of fear of insulting Jews. The sixth, AMC President Charlie Collier, turned out to be Jewish.

The ADL poll, [Chairman Abe Foxman] pointed out, showed that 59% of Americans think Hollywood execs "do not share the religious and moral values of most Americans," and 43% think the entertainment industry is waging an organized campaign to "weaken the influence of religious values in this country."

"What is true is that there are a lot of Jews in Hollywood," he said. Instead of "control," Foxman would prefer people say that many executives in the industry "happen to be Jewish," as in "all eight major film studios are run by men who happen to be Jewish."

"I think Jews are disproportionately represented in the creative industry. They're disproportionate as lawyers and probably medicine here as well," he said. He argues that this does not mean that Jews make pro-Jewish movies any more than they do pro-Jewish surgery. Though other countries, I've noticed, aren't so big on circumcision.

I don't care if Americans think we're running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government. I just care that we get to keep running them.

Sunday, May 10, 2009

The link was being redirected to a site that I do not in any way support or condone.
I took it down as soon as it was brought to my attention.
My apologies to anyone to whom I have misrepresented myself. To be clear,

Saturday, April 4, 2009

A prominent Massachusetts anesthesiologist allegedly fabricated 21 medical studies that claimed to show benefits from painkillers like Vioxx and Celebrex, according to the hospital where he worked.

Baystate Medical Center, Springfield, Mass., said that its former chief of acute pain, Scott S. Reuben, had faked data used in the studies, which were published in several anesthesiology journals between 1996 and 2008.

The hospital has asked the medical journals to retract the 21 studies, some of which reported favorable results from the use of painkillers like Pfizer Inc.'s Bextra and Merck & Co.'s Vioxx -- both since withdrawn -- as well as Pfizer's Celebrex and Lyrica. Dr. Reuben's research work also claimed positive findings for Wyeth's antidepressant Effexor XR as a pain killer. And he wrote to the Food and Drug Administration, urging the agency not to restrict the use of many of the painkillers he studied, citing his own data on their safety and effectiveness.

His work is considered important in encouraging doctors to combine the use of painkillers like Celebrex and Lyrica for patients undergoing common procedures such as knee and hip replacements.

Dr. Reuben had been a paid speaker on behalf of Pfizer's medicines, and it paid for some of his research.

Dr. Reuben is on an indefinite leave from his post at Baystate, the hospital said. He no longer holds an appointment as a professor at Tufts University's medical school, according to the university.

"We analyzed it and made figures and graphs, and sent it back, and wrote papers, and everything seemed fine," said Dr. Kroin of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. "If someone has a good reputation, has 10 years of papers and has a very high position within their medical school, generally you assume they have a lot of integrity."

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Researchers predict there will be a surge in the worldwide dependency of robots during the next decade.

Whilst it has previously been considered it will take a long time for robots to match humans and human-controlled technology, it seems the moment is now imminent. As the International Federation of Robotics has stated, the next three years will see a phenomenal rise in the use of robots.

An intensive study into the possible achievements of robots has allowed scientists to surmise there will be an amalgamation between humans and robots. Antonio Lopez Palaez, co-author of the research and a Professor of Sociology at Spain’s National Distance Learning University said,

“Just as we depend on mobile phones and cars in our daily lives, the next 15 years will see mass hybridization between humans and robots.”

In the US robots are already being employed in logistics support by controlling unmanned vehicles. Whilst pilotless airplanes are being guided by robots, so confident are scientists of the potential of these machines, it has been suggested 40 per cent of the world’s armies will be made up of robots by the year 2020.

Armies of robots, robotic partners and workforces made up entirely of walking and talking machines, suggests the world may be heading towards a robotic revolution.

Monday, October 13, 2008

I can't make the bipartisan march towarda police-state One World Government any clearer than this.

We Must Wake Up And Face It!.

A preliminary step is to recognize simple symbolism.Pyramids/Triangles, The All Seeing Eye, and Suns/Sunrises are the easiest to spot.

You can start with the Obama logo...

"We are grateful to The Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the work is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."

Friday, October 3, 2008

3rd Infantry’s 1st Brigade Combat Team trains for a new dwell-time mission. Helping ‘people at home’ may become a permanent part of the active Army.

Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), as an on-call federal response force for natural or man-made emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.

This new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.

After 1st BCT finishes its dwell-time mission, expectations are that another, as yet unnamed, active-duty brigade will take over and that the mission will be a permanent one.

They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack.

The 1st BCT’s soldiers also will learn how to use “the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded,” 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.

“It’s a new modular package of nonlethal capabilities that they’re fielding. They’ve been using pieces of it in Iraq, but this is the first time that these modules were consolidated and this package fielded, and because of this mission we’re undertaking we were the first to get it.”

The package includes equipment to stand up a hasty road block; spike strips for slowing, stopping or controlling traffic; shields and batons; and, beanbag bullets.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

The Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and The Council on Foreign Relations has made public a twenty eight page document called ‘Vision 2015’ which outlines a plan to integrate the entire United States intelligence network into a global intelligence community.

“Old problems assume new dimensions: information operations with emphasis on a cyber domain, asymmetric political or military responses, and illicit trafficking. Lastly, we confront the challenge of acting in an environment that is more time-sensitive and open to the flow of information, in which intelligence sources and analysis compete in a public context established by a global media. By 2015 we will need integrated and collaborative capabilities that can anticipate and rapidly respond to a wide array of threats and risks.” –Mike McConnell (DNI)

This mammoth global intelligence project has been under wraps for some time and now the NGOs, members of elite academia and think tanks are going to unveil it in front of our eyes as if it was a brand new concept.

“Our analytic professionals will collaborate with world-class experts in academe, commercial interests, and think tanks, all with similar knowledge and personal networks. Deep expertise will require broad access to open source information, our unique collection results, and a network of outside experts.” –Mike McConnell (DNI)

Our world has slowly been globalized from the economic sector to health, wealth and trade. The direct and after effects of the IMF [International Monetary Fund], WTO [World Trade Organization], and WHO [World Health Organization] are well known but just imagine the power and influence that will be wielded by those who will control our spy satellites and command intelligence forces around the world.

“By 2015, the Intelligence Community will be expected to provide more details about more issues to more customers. We anticipate different types of customers — with greater expectations — and new demands to change the basic engagement model by which we serve them.

The intelligence agencies which provide geopolitical statistical data and analysis increasingly have to compete with multinational corporations who have former high-level military generals on staff making six figure salaries. Booz Allen Hamilton, Blackwater Worldwide, SAIC [Science Applications International Corporation] and others have Intel analysts who have been providing services to not only the NSA [National Security Agency], NGA [National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency], and NRO [National Reconnaissance Office] but also to foreign governments. These multilateral corporations offer their services to the highest bidder. Everything is for sale in this global economy.

“The opportunity now exists to tap into a vastly larger amount of expertise than was previously available to intelligence.

The new paradigm, in contrast, will focus on “open source” information and reach out to a wide variety of experts who are non-intelligence professionals drawn from different sectors and often non-Americans.” –Roger Z. George (CIA)

Globalization dissolves our borders, strips us of our independence and renders us dependant on unstable nations for our daily bread and clothes on our backs. This should be a stark example for anyone who would rely on this government for the protection of their life and liberty. The only way to survive in this new dark age of global governance is to become self reliant. Let’s establish our own intelligence network on and off the internet.

Monday, May 19, 2008

One of the great staples of the modern Washington movie is the dark and ruthless corporation whose power extends into every cranny around the globe, whose technological expertise is without peer, whose secrets are unfathomable, whose riches defy calculation, and whose network of allies, in and out of government, is held together by webs of money, ambition, and fear. You've seen this movie a dozen times. Men in black coats step from limousines on wintry days and refer guardedly to unspeakable things. Surveillance cameras and eavesdropping devices are everywhere. Data scrolls across the movie screen in digital fonts. Computer keyboards clack softly. Seemingly honorable people at the summit of power—Cabinet secretaries, war heroes, presidents—turn out to be pathetic pawns of forces greater than anyone can imagine. And at the pinnacle of this dark and ruthless corporation is a relentless and well-tailored titan—omniscient, ironic, merciless—played by someone like Christopher Walken or Jon Voight.

If there were such a company it might look a lot like the largest government contractor you've never heard of: a company known simply by the nondescript initials SAIC (for Science Applications International Corporation)...

Sunday, May 18, 2008

The Carlyle Group is a private equity fund – a group of financial advisers that invests large sums of money from pension funds, large corporations, wealthy individuals and foreign banks into privately held companies in many different industries, and then run those companies until the market is right to sell them at a substantial profit. During the early years of the George W. Bush administration, it gained attention – and some notoriety – because of the large number of former high-ranking political figures it had attracted as advisers and managers. They included former President George H.W. Bush, former Secretary of State James Baker and former British Prime Minister John Major.

Shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, Carlyle was in the news again when newspapers revealed that Osama Bin Laden’s family in Saudi Arabia – which owns one of the world’s largest construction companies – held a stake in the fund...

Booz Allen prides itself on the long-term personal relationships it has forged between its personnel and their government clients. “We stay for a lifetime,” Mark J. Gerencser, the senior vice president in charge of Booz Allen’s government contracting division, remarked in 2006. A quick study of their biographies posted on Booz Allen’s Website suggests that this is indeed true – the senior management have shuttled back and forth between the company and the government for their entire lives...

Booz Allen Hamilton’s most illustrious alumnus is Michael McConnell, the current Director of National Intelligence, the top spy job in the country, who epitomizes the term revolving door, spinning from government job to industry and back again.

McConnell was a senior Pentagon official during George Bush Senior’s administration and the first Gulf War, where he worked for Dick Cheney, then the Secretary of Defense, as the chief intelligence adviser to General Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Cheney was so impressed with McConnell’s work during the war that he appointed him to head the NSA in 1993 (he later intervened personally to convince McConnell to take the DNI job in 2007). He now oversees all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, and thus much of Booz Allen’s government business...

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Bank CEOs missed the mark in forecasting the destructive path of today's credit crisis. That's why we shouldn't take too seriously their predictions that it is almost over now.

Some of Wall Street's biggest names have been proclaiming in recent weeks that the worst of the financial market turmoil is likely done. JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon thinks it is "maybe 75 percent to 80 percent over," while Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein says "we're closer to the end than the beginning."

Those kind of comments helped put a positive spin on what otherwise would have been a tough earnings season for financial companies, which have tallied massive losses as mortgage and other debt woes continued to weigh on their businesses.

It's in the CEOs' best interests to steer sentiment higher. If people feel better about the state of the economy or financial markets, that will lead to more deals or stock trading and will boost bank profits.

The data don't back up their happy views, however. We're still stuck in a painful housing downturn, mortgage defaults continue to soar, and rising inflation is hurting businesses and consumers.

The credit crisis has led to more than $200 billion in write-downs taken by banks and financial firms over the last year — far more than anyone had expected, given the optimism of those companies' CEOs last summer.

As the housing market contraction accelerated and subprime borrowers were increasingly defaulting on their home loans in the first part of 2007, those executives were telling us not to worry.

Last June, Bear Stearns CFO Sam Molinaro talked about how the high level of subprime mortgage defaults hadn't "spilled" into other areas of the market. Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O'Neal said the subprime crisis was "reasonably well contained."

And in July Citigroup's CEO Chuck Prince said: "When the music stops in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing."

All those executives are now out of work and all their banks are now wallflowers.

By August, risk aversion spread through the marketplace, and has since paralyzed credit markets and caused a tightening of lending standards for consumers and businesses.

That's why we might want to listen cautiously to what the bank CEOs are saying now. Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, commented at the company's annual meeting that the worst is "behind us." Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack told investors that the collapse of the subprime market in the U.S. has reached its eighth inning or maybe the "top of the ninth."

Weighing against that are findings of a new CEO survey from the Financial Services Forum, which represents 20 of the largest U.S. financial companies. The survey showed that executives by a wide margin believed that the current credit turmoil has far to go; one in three of those CEOs polled put the likelihood of a recession at 100 percent.

Among the trade group's members is current Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, who reported on Thursday that the investment bank had a $2.14 billion first-quarter loss and write-downs of $6.5 billion on its debt including mortgage-related securities and leveraged loans.

"I hope those who say we are at the end are correct. I am somewhat more skeptical," Thain told the Financial Times after the earnings were released.

Last summer, Bank of America's Ken Lewis seemed confident that the end was nearing for the housing slump. On Monday, the Charlotte, N.C.-based bank said its profits tumbled 77 percent in the first quarter due to trading losses and a $3.3 billion increase in reserves for problem loans.

"I think first it would be too early to strike up the band and sing happy days are here again," Lewis said Monday on a conference call with analysts during which he said the situation in the capital markets was particularly tough in March.

Forget about ninth, or even eighth inning. Maybe we haven't even gotten to the seventh inning stretch yet.

Friday, April 18, 2008

In a keynote address at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff warned that the damage caused by a large-scale cyberattack might result in consequences comparable to the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center buildings in New York.

"We have to look not only at threats that have materialized in the past," said Chertoff. "We have to consider the threats that may materialize in the future. ... We know that a successful large-scale cyberattack against our country would have very wide-reaching consequences."

Through the Internet, terrorists and criminals can do the kind of damage they could never do on their own, Chertoff said.

"Imagine what would happen if it were possible for hackers to enter the air travel system," he said.

Chertoff characterized cybersecurity as a very serious challenge, one that is likely to grow more serious over time. A network response, he said, is necessary to deal with network attacks.

"It takes a network to beat a network," said Chertoff.

Though US-CERT, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, which provides information necessary to defend the nation's networks, Chertoff hopes to bring additional resources to bear to defend the country's computers.

Chertoff likened the government's attempt to improve its cybersecurity to the intensive effort of the Manhattan Project that brought the atomic bomb to fruition. In January, President Bush signed an order that gave DHS and the National Security Agency greater power to oversee government computer security. Details about what the agencies are doing remain classified.

Chertoff also emphasized the need for the federal government to engage with the private sector, given that so much of the nation's critical infrastructure is secured by private organizations.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Rob Painter doesn't fit the typical profile of a Google Inc. employee. While many of the company's new workers are hired fresh from prestigious universities, Painter, the chief technologist for Google's federal business, has a background that includes stints with U.S. Special Operations and the intelligence community. He's also well removed from the company's Silicon Valley headquarters, working out of Washington, D.C. and Virginia.

But Painter's division -- selling souped-up versions of Google Earth satellite-image technology to military, intelligence and other government organizations -- is one of many smaller parts of the company that is becoming increasingly important as it seeks to expand beyond its traditional online-advertising business.

To the benefit of Google and other companies, a policy authorized by President Bush in 2003 [U.S. Commercial Remote Sensing Space Policy] specifically directed agencies to rely more on commercial satellite companies. Since then, the private sector also has become able to provide better imagery through advancing technology.

DigitalGlobe Inc., for example, a provider of images to Google Earth, launched a satellite last fall that boasts clear pictures of earthbound objects as small as 50 centimeters across.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which collects and analyzes satellite imagery for national-security purposes, has awarded contracts to Google in the past. A spokesman for the NGA said Google Earth can be useful for everything from providing imagery during natural disasters to supporting the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. The NGA was established by the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Department in the 1990s.

While versions of Google Earth sold to customers like the NGA do feature imagery accessible online by the public, Painter said that they can include enhancements such as more-frequent image updates and the means to quickly access and blend in the agencies' own specific data.

Google acquired a direct line into selling the product to U.S. intelligence agencies when it bought a startup in 2004 called Keyhole Inc. Keyhole was funded by In-Q-Tel, a venture-capital fund administered by the CIA, and its technology was rebranded as Google Earth.

"We're not only interested, we're the government agency that developed Google's technology and spun it off into the private sector," the NGA spokesman said. "We've had that stuff embedded in us since day one."

Painter, who served as director of technology assessment with In-Q-Tel, pointed out that connections developed during his years in government can be of use now, with his unit growing at brisk pace: "We're functionally more than tripling the team each year."

But Google faces a number of competitors in the market, including rival Microsoft Corp.'s Virtual Earth product. What's more, the NGA has developed its own technology, called Palanterra, which the NGA spokesman described as "exactly the same kind of system that allows you to look at a part of the world and have the maps and charts readily available along the lines of Google."

Google's contract opportunities may expand alongside a private sector progressively able to provide better satellite imagery. Its partner DigitalGlobe, for example, plans to launch a new satellite by the end of this year called WorldView-2, which is touted as a significant step forward.

"WorldView-2 will advance the state of the art ... by providing significantly expanded area coverage each day," said Steven Aftergood, a research analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. "It's a good bet that demand will follow supply."

Monday, March 31, 2008

McQ is recognized as the leading developer of air drop sensor technology using a variety of innovative approaches.

Recently, we developed for the United States Special Operations Command an airdrop weather station with satellite communications. This special unit was designed to survive an unretarded airdrop from C-130 aircraft and helicopters.

The Remote Miniature Weather Station (RMWS) is dropped from the aircraft, falls to the earth, automatically rights itself and deploys a solid state sensor pod up from the ground. The weather station provides temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, visibility, wind speed and direction.

McQ has also developed a RMWS Support System (RSS) that is a camouflaged airdrop unit that can point communications antennas to relay data via satellite. McQ has developed RemoteSense surveillance sensors that can be airdropped in camouflage packages.

Monday, March 24, 2008

Google Plan Would Open TV Band For Wireless UseBloomberg News
The New York Times

Google proposed a plan on Monday that may let wireless Internet devices use vacant television airwaves without interfering with current equipment.

In a letter to the Federal Communications Commission, Google offered suggestions on how the airwaves, known as white spaces, could provide high-speed mobile access to consumers without disrupting televisions and wireless microphones.

Google and Microsoft are part of a group that wants the F.C.C. to unlock the airwaves for unlicensed uses, like mobile Web access, after broadcasters convert to digital signals in 2009. Google said that its proposals could help ensure that consumers anywhere would be able to use devices on those airwaves by late next year.

“Google is a strong believer in the potential of this spectrum to bring Internet access to more Americans,” Richard S. Whitt, a lawyer for the company, based in Mountain View, Calif., said in a conference call. “The spectrum is way too valuable to be wasted.”

Google plans to bolster revenue by creating more Internet services for mobile phones and devices. Portable technology is outselling personal computers, giving the company new spots to place online advertising. Only about 5 percent of the nation’s TV white spaces are being used, Mr. Whitt said.

Last week, Google scored a victory in an F.C.C. auction of airwaves after Verizon Wireless agreed to spend $4.74 billion on spectrum that will be available for any legal device. Bids had to surpass a $4.6 billion threshold to activate the so-called open-access rules on the spectrum. Google had sought the rules to spur the use of new wireless devices.

To protect airwaves used by the military and public safety agencies, Google proposed the use of spectrum-sensing technology, which would free up the airwaves when they are needed by the government. The company also backed ideas submitted by Motorola last year that would protect TV signals and wireless microphones.

In addition to Google and Microsoft, the White Spaces Coalition includes Royal Philips Electronics, Intel and Dell. The proposals announced Monday were developed by Google alone, Mr. Whitt said.

Next time you see a few colorful balloons floating through the sky, don't assume they're the remnants of a child's birthday part. A new patent describes small balloons that "may act robotically (in unison) without command input at times." The balloons, which would be powered by combustible gas, would provide "video surveillance." The patent goes on to describe the potential uses:

In modern counter-insurgency warfare, as well as domestic urban assaults, there is no substitute for knowing the quantity and exact location of enemy combatants. Satellite surveillance is certainly useful, but can be obscured by cloud cover. Unmanned aerial surveillance vehicles are also useful, but are either at elevations too high to provide the desired viewing angle or when making low passes, are only in a particular location for a brief amount of time.

Having better knowledge of enemy positions, especially in house-to-house fighting, is not only advantageous in preserving the lives of friendly combatants by pinpointing the enemy's location, strength, and weaponry. By careful targeting guided by improved surveillance, lives of innocent civilians will also be saved that would otherwise have been lost.

Soldiers have always suffered from lack of knowledge regarding what is "just around the corner". The concept of deploying a cluster of miniature surveillance balloons addresses this problem. These devices would observe activity and relay video or still image information from one to the next, the information eventually arriving at the soldiers who require the information and/or Command & Control.

These miniature surveillance balloons are essentially robots--capable of operating on their own when necessary. They also are able to operate in an intelligent cluster where together they can accomplish a goal by coordinating their efforts. Thus they become a socially interactive multiple robot system. Methods for controlling and manipulating a cluster of such robots have been described in a number of prior art references.

What is currently lacking, besides miniaturization, is the ability of a robot surveillance balloon to control its position in order to coordinate with other such balloons to effectively cover the deployment such that the desired surveillance objective is properly viewed. To do this, a balloon should have the ability to control its motion in both vertical and lateral directions.

Quite obviously, another use of such a balloon is as an explosive: "[the] unit may optionally carry a small amount of explosive to be used as a weapon if necessary."

Thursday, March 6, 2008

"World of Evil is an all-out AV assault on an American political machine now in psychotic overdrive for the Presidential election. A 5000 frame crash edit comedy celebration of the blatant corruption, florid insanity and plain good old smelly bullshit that characterises the political landscape of the world's most powerful country."

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

DARPA Contracts Northrop & Lockheed For Next-Gen Satellites

Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC) has been awarded the first phase of a four phase advanced research contract to design and build a cluster of wirelessly interconnected free flying spacecraft.

Awarded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Phase 1 of the Future, Flexible, Fast, Fractionated, Free-Flying, Spacecraft united by Information Exchange (F6) program is a 12-month study of ways to break up a typical monolithic satellite into distributed modules. In Phase 1, Northrop Grumman will develop a satellite-to-satellite wireless network, a distributed command and control system, and network protocols.

Rather than being assembled onto a monolithic bus satellite, components of the F6 are distributed onto separate spacecraft modules. By the end of the first phase, Northrop Grumman will demonstrate essential networking and communications capabilities, will present a preliminary design and will prove the business case for this strategy. An actual flight demonstration composed of multiple satellites will be developed in subsequent phases.

The functionality of a traditional satellite will be reconstituted by a cluster of wirelessly interconnected spacecraft modules that fly in approximately the same orbit while flying freely in space. In this distributed virtual satellite system, each "fractionated" module contributes a unique capability such as command and data handling, guidance and navigation, and payload functions. At the same time, virtual and distributed satellite components do not interfere with each other, do not have to be developed on the same schedule and can be replaced more cost effectively.

The System F6 concept is enabled by five technology pillars: autonomous self-forming networks, wireless communications and power, cluster operations, and distributed computing. The combination of these elements represents a next generation space satellite structural design.

Northrop Grumman's Space Technology sector is leading a diverse team that will develop and integrate key technologies for the F6 program. This team is composed of Swales Aerospace, a division of Alliant Techsystems Inc.; NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; L3Comm; BAE Systems; Payload Systems, a division of Aurora Flight Sciences Corporation; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Cornell University.

A team headed by Lockheed Martin Corp.'s (LMT) Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co. received a $5.7 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to compete in Phase 1 development of the System F6 space technology program.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

U.S. War Games Causing A Stir In Southeast Asia

Korea-U.S. Joint Military Exercise BeginsThe Chosun Ilbo

South Korean and U.S. forces on Sunday began Key Resolve, an annual joint military exercise that practices the rapid deployment of U.S. troop reinforcements to Korea in the event of war on the Korean Peninsula.

Until 2007 the exercise had been called "Reception, Staging, Onward Movement and Integration of Forces" (RSOI). This year's exercise will be conducted throughout the southern part of Korea until Friday.

Foal Eagle, a joint field maneuver drill, will also be conducted during the same period.

During Key Resolve, U.S. troop reinforcements will deploy from the U.S. mainland and Pacific bases in Hawaii and Guam to mock battlefields in Korea, and South Korean and U.S. forces will conduct joint operations in preparation for war on the Korean Peninsula.

About 6,000 U.S. troop reinforcements from overseas will join 12,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea in the exercise. In addition, 9,000 U.S. troops will be on standby aboard ships at sea. The total number of U.S. troops participating in this year's exercise is similar to that of previous years.

Also participating in this year's exercise are the USS Ohio, a U.S. Navy nuclear-propelled submarine which carries 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles, and the 93,000-ton USS Nimitz, a U.S. Navy nuclear-powered supercarrier.

North Korea has denounced the joint military exercise as a "war game aimed at a northward invasion."

Monday, March 3, 2008

With Web 3.0, Artificial Intelligence Makes Decisions For You!

World-Wise Web? Finally On The Horizon Are Computers That Can ReasonBy Richard Waters
Financial Times

Predicting where the next big disruptive change in the technology industry will come from is a perilous business. Google’s rise has been as much a result of its business model innovation as its technological supremacy. By using advertising to support its internet services, it may eventually be able to pull the rug from under Microsoft in more traditional software markets.

It seems a fair bet, though, that some of the biggest fortunes will continue to be made in Google’s area of focus: finding and manipulating information gathered from the world wide web. To hear the optimists in Silicon Valley describe it, a new wave of technology is on the way that will leave Google’s early advances in its wake.

This technology draws its inspiration, and some of its techniques, from a field that has provided more than its fair share of disappointments over the years: artificial intelligence (AI). Based on a collection of technologies that includes natural language processing, image recognition and expert systems (programs that try to emulate the skills of experts), AI is a 50-year-old dream that was meant to lead to intelligent machines.

As Google shows, being able to return a string of websites in response to a query can give rise to a multi-billion dollar business. With so much at stake, even small incremental improvements on the road to AI may create big business opportunities.

The movement already has a name: Web 3.0.

The basic building block for this new technology movement is something known as the “semantic web”. This has become one of the most controversial, and misused, terms in the internet industry, conjuring up as it does a vague promise that meaning will somehow become part of the medium.

In reality, the semantic web is based on a defined and narrow – even if still highly ambitious – set of goals. It is the brainchild of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the present web, a collection of documents connected by links using hypertext mark-up language. Tracing those links, companies such as Google are able to identify documents that are likely to be most relevant to a particular search – though they can only point to the document, not dig deeper to find the actual information that is being sought.

To overcome this, Sir Tim imagined a new web formed by linking the data contained inside the documents. That way the data, not just the documents, would become accessible to machines. Riding this network of links, computers would be able to follow related ideas from one website to another and draw together related information. A reference to Sir Tim in Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopaedia, could for instance be connected directly to his name in this article on FT.com and to his personal social network on Facebook.

“If you put data on the web about yourself in this form, I can pull data about you,” he says. Subject to privacy and other restrictions, the web itself would in effect become one vast social network, tracing links between people, or between people and things, that were previously invisible.

“We’re trying to create a useful point of view,” says Mr Hillis, whose latest company is seeking to build what it calls an “open, shared database of the world’s knowledge”. Investors including Goldman Sachs have put more than $50m into the company. Known as Freebase, it has a database designed to operate similarly to Wikipedia. It tries to outline standard definitions that are then made available for anyone to access and link their own data to over the web.

Further in the future, adding a degree of reasoning to the software may enable it to filter and select information. That may start off simply – acting on your behalf, for instance, a software agent sets out across the web to compare prices for a product and identify the lowest. Eventually it may lead to making decisions on your behalf. As Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, told the FT last year: “The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question, such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘Which job shall I take?’”

Saturday, March 1, 2008

Russia & China Don't Buy Excuse For Satellite Shoot-Down

China and Russia Cry Foul Over SatelliteBy David Byers
Jane Macartney
The Times

America's decision to destroy a defunct spy satellite orbiting Earth by firing a missile into outer space provoked a diplomatic row today, with both China and Russia accusing the US of having carried out a covert weapons test.

The Pentagon claimed that it had fired the missile from the Pacific Ocean to destroy the satellite - which was 133 miles above the Earth - purely because of potentially toxic hydrazine fuel on board the spacecraft which could harm humans.

However, Moscow and Beijing complained that the missile strike smacked of hypocrisy as the US had rejected a joint attempt by the two countries from banning weapons in outer space only a month ago.

A Chinese state newspaper, the People's Daily, criticized Washington for hypocrisy for rejecting a treaty to ban weapons in space proposed by Russia and China and then firing a missile at the spy satellite. Washington claims it had rejected the proposed treaty as unworkable, and said it instead favoured confidence-building efforts.

"The United States will not easily abandon its military advantage based on space technology, and it is striving to expand and fully exploit this advantage," the newspaper commentary said.

Speaking at a press conference this morning, Liu Bianca, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, said, tersely: "The Chinese side is continuing to closely follow the US action which may influence the security of outer space and may harm other countries."

His words were believed to have been carefully modulated to echo criticisms leveled at Beijing by the Bush Administration when China fired its own ground-based missile into an obsolete weather satellite in January 2007.

US defense officials say their case is different because Washington, unlike Beijing, informed the public and world leaders before firing their missile.

Monday, February 25, 2008

A True Patriot - Cynthia McKinney Exposes Israeli Espionage In U.S.

I would like to take a moment to follow the trail of another trial involving the sale or give-away of U.S. national security secrets to a foreign government; the name of that government is never mentioned; and the litigation never pierces the American psyche due to an effective news blackout. News of this is nowhere to be found while we know in detail the mental state of Brittany Spears.

Consider for just a moment what is happening, though unpublicized, today. In case number one, a Pentagon man is found with 83 top secret documents at his home, some of them having been passed to American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) who then passed them to Israel - known in the newspapers as Country A. The other case involves the outing of a CIA agent who was tracking nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. This is the case of Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, that saw the chief of staff of the Vice President of the United States [I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby] sentenced to prison, only to be later pardoned by the President!

Interestingly, when George Bush came to the White House, he brought with him Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and others. Perle would soon leave because it was learned that he tried to use his position as head of the Defense Policy Board to make money off the War on Terror. Feith, as head of the Office of Special Plans, presided over the most ignominious period in the history of the Pentagon, with it producing faked intelligence, stovepiping it to the White House, and then to the American people and the U.S. Congress, sending our young men and women into war in Iraq. Feith left the Pentagon as soon as the investigation into Larry Franklin, his subordinate in his Office, started to get hot. Larry Franklin is now in jail.

When Franklin met with two AIPAC operatives, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, what he didn't know was that every word was being recorded. Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman formed a neat circle. Elliot Abrams at the National Security Council, Dov Zakheim, Comptroller at the Pentagon, Doug Feith number three at the Pentagon in its Office of Special Plans, and Paul Wolfowitz, number two at the Pentagon, closed that circle.

Ex-CIA agent Phil Giraldi in "Kill the Messenger" confirms that both Perle and Feith were investigated by the FBI for passing secret information to Israel. He continues, "In no cases, were any of them convicted. The prosecutions were dropped ... in my opinion because of political pressure not to get into this kind of case that involves Israel and espionage." Wolfowitz was under investigation for passing U.S. secrets to Israel through AIPAC.

Spying inside the United States is not new.

In 2001, the FBI discovered new, "massive" Israeli spying operations in the East Coast, including New York and New Jersey," and they began watching Naor Gilon (at the Israeli Embassy), who eventually led them to Franklin.

In 1970 while working for a U.S. Senator, Richard Perle was caught by the FBI giving classified information to Israel.

In 1985, the New York Times reports that the FBI is aware of at least a dozen incidents in which classified information is transferred to Israel.

In 1987, the Wall Street Journal headlined that Israel's role in the Iran-Contra scandal would not be investigated by Congress.

In 1993, the Anti-Defamation League is caught operating a massive spying operation on critics of Israel, Arab-Americans, the San Francisco Labor Council, ILWU Local 10, Oakland Educational Association, NAACP, Irish Northern Aid, International Indian Treaty Council, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco police. Data collected was sent to Israel and in some cases to South Africa. Pressure from certain organizations forces the city to drop the criminal case, but the ADL settles a civil lawsuit for an undisclosed sum of cash.

General Karen Kwiatkowski, who quit the Pentagon, wrote that during her time there, Doug Feith gave the Israeli military access to the Pentagon without signing in, in violation of security policy.

And finally, Sibel Edmonds, who has a gag order on her, but she courageously is now speaking, says that Patrick Fitzgerald will find more than just a few guys spying for Israel if he conducts a real investigation. Sibel says that it's basically the same people over and over again and the activities include multi-billion dollar black-market nuclear sales to terrorists and unsavory regimes. She says that the beauty of the larger case is that you can start from any angle. If you start from the AIPAC angle, you wind up at the same people. If you start from the Valerie Plame case, you end up with the same people. The FBI probe of Pentagon intelligence activities had as its target Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans.

Sibel concludes that the investigations were shut down in 2000 and in 2001 "because they ended up going to higher levels and involving maybe way too many people, US persons. I'm talking about individuals who are breaking the law, misusing the trust and abusing their power, and in some cases I would even say engaging in treason."

KillBotCon - Major Defense Robotics Contractors To Meet In Orlando

Displays and demonstrations of robotic and unmanned vehicle systems are among featured events planned for the SPIE Defense + Security conference in Orlando, FL, USA, next month. The event is the largest international unclassified defense-related symposium and draws engineers and researchers from industry, academia, government, and military labs throughout the world. It will be held in the Orlando World Center Marriott Resort and Convention Center, with professional-development courses running 16-20 March, technical conferences 17-20 March, and the exhibition 18-20 March.

Nearly 1700 technical papers will be presented in 45 conferences, and approximately 5300 attendees are expected to attend. Topics range from core defense-related technologies to dual-use applications in IR sensing.

Highlights among special events are a plenary talk by The Honorable Jay Cohen, Undersecretary for Science and Technology, US Department of Homeland Security, and an industry forum talk by Sir John Chisholm, executive chairman of QinetiQ and chair of the UK Medical Research Council.

Space exploration is one focus of plenary sessions, with talks on the deep-space flight of the Hayabusa Asteroid Explorer by Hitoshi Kuninaka and Junichiro Kawaguchi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and protecting the Moon's environment by Jeffrey Maclure of the International Academy of Astronautics and International Institute of Space Law. Other plenary topics are display content of night-vision goggles and helmet-mounted displays, and radar sensors and imagers.

The Robotics and Unmanned Systems Pavilion will feature vehicles from the DARPA Challenge autonomous-vehicle competition, robotics systems used by the US Army and Navy, and unmanned aerial vehicles currently used in Afghanistan and Iraq. Pavilion exhibitors will showcase the latest technology in IR imagers, sensors, and optics used by military robots and unmanned systems.

Symposium chairs are Larry B. Stotts, deputy director for strategic technology at DARPA, and Ray O. Johnson, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Lockheed Martin and a member of the SPIE board of directors. More information is available online at spie.org/defense-security.xml.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

U.S. & W.H.O. Accused Of Spreading Bird Flu In SE Asia

The Indonesian Health Minister has said the United States and the World Health Organization are part of a global conspiracy to profit from the spread of bird flu and the US may use samples to produce biological weapons.

The views of Dr Siti Fadilah Supari, outlined in her new book, threaten to undermine efforts to control the spread of avian influenza. With 104 deaths, nearly half the world total, Indonesia is the new hotspot for the virus.

In the book, Dr Supari writes that WHO laboratories forwarded influenza viruses to Western companies so they could profit by selling vaccines back to developing countries: "The system of world health management has been very exploitative. It has been controlled by inhumanly desires, based on the greediness to raise capital and to control the world."

Chertoff Gets Sued Over Border Wall Land Grabs

February is not a good month for Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. He has just been sued by a team of legal experts headed by Peter Schey of the Los Angeles based Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law.

When Chertoff began wielding his power to build a border wall along the US-Mexico border, border residents knew it was an abuse of his power and that he was violating human rights and the Constitution. Finding someone to defend the owners of property along the border was not easy, especially when elected officials in highest offices of the respective states, California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, in concert with the nationally elected officials, turned their heads, covered their eyes and failed to protect the people who elected them to protect them and their property rights from such abuses of power.

It became even more difficult to level the legal playing field when the political talk show hosts in their techno towers referred to border residents, opponents of the border wall and the property owners in degrading and demeaning terms. The federal officials began stalking property owners to persuade them to grant access to their private property. They even bullied city and county officials, using every tactic in the political play-book. Things changed when Chertoff began abusing his powers against the property owners in Texas. A legal team of experienced professionals has since come together to defend and protect the human rights and constitutional rights from such abuse of power.

The law suit is filed by Peter A. Schey, Carlos Holguin and Dawn Schock of the Center of Human Rights and Constitutional Law as well as James Harrington, Abner Burnett and Corinna Spencer-Scheurick of the South Texas Civil Rights Project. The lawsuit they filed states that the “plaintiff the United States and Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff have acted in flagrant disregard of the laws of the United States” and “obviously are not authorized by the Constitution or Congress to seize land owned by cities, private property owners, and land-grant owners in violation of federal laws. Yet this is precisely what is appears that they are doing in their actions to immediately seize ownership of border properties.”

What does this mean? This means that Chertoff knowingly has abused his power over the citizens of the United States of America. Can a man legally commit such acts of aggression against US citizens? Can a man who was not elected by the people of the United States disregard the Constitution and the Congress and seize citizens’ property?

While it is true that the Secure Fence Act of 2006 provided for the construction of 700 miles of border wall, that act was amended by the 2008 Appropriations Act and signed into law on December 26, 2007.

The reality is that Chertoff does not have to build the wall on anyone’s land. The reality is that Chertoff wants to build the wall there. The reality is that Chertoff does not have the authority to build the wall on any land without consulting those affected by it. The reality is that he has never consulted with those who would be affected and whose land he is seizing.

It is a pity that sincere hardworking citizens have to fight the abusiveness of their own government in order to protect their rights. What’s worse is that they are forced to defend themselves against the very agency that was set up to protect citizens from terrorism, an agency that is causing more terror in the lives of such Americans then they’ve ever experienced before.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Russia Says HAARP Could Cause Polar Shift

Russian Journal: HAARP Could Capsize PlanetBy Sharon Weinberger
Wired

Just when you think you've heard all the possible far-out theories behind the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) in Alaska, leave it to the Russians to come up with one better. Forget mind control, the Russians think HAARP is a "geophysical weapon" that's gonna capsize the planet. HAARP, just by way of a reminder for those who don't obssessively follow its progress, is a military project that's supposed to study the ionosphere and "use it to enhance communications and surveillance systems for both civilian and defense purposes." In more recent years, the Pentagon has also expressed interest in using HAARP to mitigate the effects of high-altitude nuclear explosions. However, HAARP's use of an antenna array operating in the High Frequency (HF) range has also prompted tons and tons of other theories about its uses, ranging from weather control to altering human behavior.

According to this article published in a Russian military journal (and helpfully translated by the CIA-funded Open Source Center), HAARP is the ultimate superweapon:

Some Russian and foreign analysts argue that the US program is in effect a disguised idea of creation of an immensely powerful ray, a geophysical weapon, whose principle of operation is based on the use of means of influencing the processes which take place in the solid, liquid and gaseous layers of the Earth for military purposes.

It is possible to control the artificially created plasmoid (localized areas of highly ionized gas - E.L.) or a globular lightning in ionosphere by using lasers to shift the focal point of the aerials. In other words, using enormous installations, Americans plan to bombard the sky with energy beams which, when they are reflected from ionosphere, can return back to Earth in the form of low-frequency electromagnetic waves.

The opponents of the program have quite weighty reasons not to trust the soothing statements by Americans.

"The layer of ionosphere which is excited by HAARP influences the radio and electronic equipment which is installed in the military hardware: Fire control and guidance systems, fire adjustment equipment, navigation systems, etc. As a result, an aircraft or a missile will be damaged if they fly through the beam," Col Plaksin said.

And this is by far not the only consequence of implementation of the HAARP program. Compared to, say, nuclear weapons, geophysical weapons are much more powerful. And if, say, the beam is sent to Britain, it can make the country dysfunctional in a matter of seconds.

So, some scientists say that a group of the military who use the geophysical weapon might bring the economy of an entire country on its knees in a few years' time - and no one will understand anything.

The most dangerous thing is that even developers cannot say with certainty what will happen to the planet and how ionosphere will react to the attack with these rays if the system is switched to the maximum power. As is known, ionosphere and the ozone layer protect the Earth from the deadly cosmic radiation. The electromagnetic cannon of the HAARP system will damage ionosphere, and the cosmic radiation will be able to reach the surface of the planet.

Moreover, the effects of this know-how (as published) cannot be controlled, some researchers say. Even a single use of this weapon may result in so-called trigger effect which no one will be able to stop: Earthquakes, sudden cooling on the global scale, etc. In the opinion of Canadian scientist Rosalie Bertel, who is studying the effects of wars on the environment, intense disturbance of ionosphere may result in a release of huge masses of free electrons - so-called electron showers. For its part, this might result in the change of electric potential of the poles and ensuing shift of the magnetic pole of the Earth. Simply speaking, the planet will "capsize." So the location of the north pole will become uncertain.

The only mission of 3rdEye News is the dissemination of these facts for the objective critique of those who seek them.Posts are excerpts with links to the source material used in accordance with the Fair Use Act.

Comments are greatly appreciated.

Google Highlighted terms for more information.PRESS CTRL+D TO BOOKMARK